“People who say we don’t use free agency are wrong,” Thompson said. “We’ve always dabbled in free agency. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time and effort recruiting a guy, which we’ve done in the past, and nothing comes of it, and nothing comes out publicly and people assume we didn’t try to do something. We almost always, almost every offseason, try to do something in free agency, certainly with our own guys but also with guys around the league.”

So yeah. Take that, naysayers!

Of course, a sane person might think maybe you should change your approach if you’re constantly trying to lure guys via free agency and never getting any. Because we can all see the end result.

Whether it’s true or not, there’s a perception that the Packers like to nickel and dime guys. And that’s swell if you’re a big fan of salary cap space, but most of us are fans of players and teams.

As far as all of that goes, we’ll just say Ron Wolf did it right, Mike Sherman did it wrong and Ted Thompson does it very uninterestingly.

Here’s the thing though about the big money guys in FA. They’ve already paid their dues and now they have the big paycheck. In a lesser person, that could be de-motivational, as in “Why should I risk a serious, serious injury now that I have $50 mil in the bank?”

Ron Wolf, love the guy, but he gets a lot of run for acquiring some vets at the end of their career for cheap. Not counting Reggie White, who we paid good money for and who was the biggest signing in the history of free agency.